There's higher profit margins implying it's not expensive because it has higher cost, they just see higher profits, so they'll be sure as hell not want to decrease price later

Don't worry, California just voted no to taxing above 1 billion. Even when most of the voters do not make it, or ever will in their lifetime, yet they voted against it

Yeah, as someone who has moved so much, I miss community the most, and it looks like you can't really build a community. Specially not like the one you were born into. Where we grew up people did help each other, for houses you'd still need some people that are qualified and experienced, and people can chime in a bit of materials and labor. But when hiring help you still hired from your community.

And when some quality of life improvements comes whole community would do it at once. Like I remember we moving from ventless oven to oven that vents outside and we got some of the tools as a community and tool turn using it so everyone improved their ovens for cheap

Hmm, I guess they have to control it somehow. In US the land is super cheap, but even if you want to build a house yourself, you still have to goto contractors for materials and things, and everything ends up being more expensive than what a company can buy them for. So you end up with around the same price as a new house you can buy even if you save a bit of labor. Only people I've seen do it are people already in construction industry and can get materials for similar prices and use their connections for things

Grew up in a country without elevators, as children we were told foreign country landlords stay on the ground floor and rent floors above, might be related to this. I think people there prefer higher floors for privacy and sun, sometimes easier roof access compared to bottom floors

Lead has a very stable nucleolus. Forever chemicals (PFAS) were named that because they were stable. CFCs were pretty harmless too until we learned about ozone layer.

Anything that industry makes and distributes in large quantities throughout the world is pretty bad because by the time we learn about long term impacts, it's everywhere

I'm sure the last one is useful to the IT people from my last company. There's no way anyone is using the computers I left with arch on it without installing windows.

Yup. When my wife asked me if one of my friend doesn't eat meat for religious reasons or sth else, my answer was "I don't know" because we never had that conversation. Some people are vegetarian, some are vegan, I don't really think about asking why unless it comes up. I know some of my cousins don't eat meat because they grew up in the city and one time they visited the farms and saw how meat is made and they couldn't eat after that. But that info came from their parents, I never thought about asking, and I like it when someone doesn't ask me about my preferences too when I reject certain food.

Fun anecdote but from another side: I eat meat but not regularly. I ordered vegetarian option on a lunch with people because I didn't like the meat options they had. But the vegetarian person was like "why are you ordering vegetarian? You don't have food restrictions do you?" I didn't say anything but I was thinking "how does me being ok eating meat means I need to eat it every meal?"

It's the "I need to give a gift" mentality people have, specifically old people. I have told Grandma/Grandpa that I don't need birthday gifts and such, but they just keep giving gift cards. Because not giving something makes them think they're bad. While companies make profit, I'd honestly like straight cash over gift cards.

If it's not we got something from virus that helped us, and chimps got something that limited them. Then it's funnily possible for a global pandemic to make our whole population stupid. Normally evolution would work out and smarter population would do better, but for us it depends on which side has nukes. So ...

True, but we have to know AI is making it wayy worse. The same people who were barely getting by, are now using AI to write softwares that'll be used for years to come. And other people that don't have developer experience and aren't good themselves don't have any idea and really trust those developers because "they make things happen" like "magic". Previously they'd take a lot more time to make something work, it'd be shitty, but it'd be obvious for any developers that come after them. Now detection is hard, and the volume has increased.